Do you want to restart Apache, or do you want to gracefully reload its configuration?

Everyone was answering the first question; you can do the second with

sudo apache2ctl graceful

or

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Gracefully reloading is a bit faster, and there's no downtime. There's one caveat: if your apache config files contain an error, the server will silently exit without printing any error messages to the console.

The recommended way under Ubuntu to start/stop services (not just
Apache) is to use the start/stop/reload commands (which really are
symbolic links to the initctl
program, part of upstart).

For services that use the legacy /etc/init.d scripts, the
corresponding script will be called with the correct parameters; for
services that use the upstart infrastructure, the appropriate event
transition will be signaled to the
upstart daemon via
initctl.

root isn't disabled, it just doesn't have a password if you don't give it one yourself.
–
Mikael AunoOct 12 '10 at 11:05

1

is //stop apache supposed to be a comment? if so, standard shell notation would be #stop apache, // doesn't work in bash
–
MikelJan 24 '11 at 8:05

@MikaelAuno root account is disabled if it doesn't have a password
–
T0xicCodeApr 16 '12 at 0:25

@xav0989 That's quite the matter of definition. Sure you can't directly log in as root, or log in as root in any way that requires root's password for that matter, but there are other ways to become root. Try for example sudo -i followed by whoami and you'll see that you are indeed logged in as root. Also, if you do ps aux | grep root you'll see that you already have lots of processes on your system running as root. So, arguably, root is not disabled.
–
Mikael AunoApr 19 '12 at 16:33

@MikaelAuno or sudo -E -s. By disabled I'm assuming that what was meant is that you can't directly login as root, but you can still run processes as root.
–
T0xicCodeApr 19 '12 at 20:07